How To Make Organic Soap

Tired of using soaps and other cosmetics filled with unknown chemicals on your body? Making soap is really easy and in this video, you can learn how to make your own homemade soap with the aroma of your choice!

Today, I am going to be showing you how to make organic soap. The ingredients I have are beautiful selection of oils and butters and I am using olive oil, coconut oil, palm and Shea butter, the organic varieties of these ingredients. I am also going to be using sodium hydroxide and water because you cannot actually make soap without these ingredients. More about those in a minute. The olive oil adds a lovely miniaturization to my soap, so anyone with itchy dry skin will really benefit from an organic soap made with olive oil. We are also going to be using coconut oil that adds lovely lather to my soap so instantly we have got some bubbles when we wash. Then, I have got palm oil, the organic variety, which will create a lovely waxy texture for my soap and then my favorite ingredient, Shea butter, which is rather like pouring a bottle of moisturizing lotion into your soap, adds a lovely creamy texture. As I said, we cannot make organic soap without using sodium hydroxide and water. Independently with each other, they are not a dangerous product, but once you mix the water with sodium hydroxide, we create lye which is a little bit caustic, fine to use as long as you know how to handle it properly. The water I have here is just water from my tap. Although you could use bottled water, water from the tap will make just as good soap. I am going to weight the water because I need 176 grams. Now, 176 grams is exactly the same as 176 mils. Pretty fun looking at the display on the scale so it is easier for me to be absolutely accurate. 178, a little bit too far. There we are, perfect. But try to work out where 176 is. Using the scale would be very difficult for me, and I need to be accurate. Put that to one side, while I work on the sodium hydroxide. For this recipe, I need 70 grams of sodium hydroxide and I am going to weigh it into my little bowl. So, it is fairly innocuous looking white powder, looks pretty much like salts that you might sprinkle onto your food but it's not the same. Here we are, 70 grams. And now, very carefully, without breathing the fumes, I am going to pour my sodium hydroxide into the water. Now technically at this point, this is now called lye because it is not alkali solution. Stir around to make sure it is fully dissolved and there are no gritty bits on the bottom. And as I am doing this, the temperature of the water is increasing. It will get very, very hot and it will let of some fumes and they are not very pleasant, should you swallow them, so I always recommend that once you've made your lye, you just put to one side while you work on the oils. That is getting to hot to touch underneath. Now, it is time to weigh the oils and butters and get them into our sauce pan to melt. I am going to add them in any order but palm oil is going in first. Palm oil is our ingredient that adds that lovely waxy hardness to our soap. And for this recipe, I need 85 grams of palm oil. I am making about 6 bars of soap here so I need roughly 600 grams in total. So, 85 into our sauce pan. Our coconut oil, very moisturizing, but I use it because it creates big, rich, foamy soap, a lovely lather. Here we need more coconut oil than we use palm oil and we are going to be using 128 of coconut oil. Add it to the palm and then finally, lovely Shea butter. This soap will be very moisturizing anyway but Shea butter is like pouring a bottle of moisturizer into your soap, very, very creamy, and we only need to add 30 to make a big difference. Okay, not quite that much. Just a small bit of Shea butter, pop that into our sauce pans. And now I need our lovely solid oils to melt. So I am just going to pop it on to a low heat just so they turn liquid. So, that is all the hard oils melted, so the coconut, the Shea butter and the palm oil are all merged into a nice golden liquid, and I'm going to add 227 grams of olive oil and mix that together. So, my sauce, for now, contains melted oils, and I need to add the lye solution to it. Now, very good habit to get into - when I pour the hot lye into the hot oils, there may be some form of reaction in my sauce pan, so I always just pour tiny bit in, and if it does not stop fizzing up, then I know the temperature is alright for me to merge the two. Now, there was no reaction in that. And now I am going to stir until we get to the next stage. You know, water and oils do not really like to mix together so I need to keep stirring it to make sure they stay together. Depending on the temperature of the air and the temperature of the oils, this stage might take you, well, anything up to 3 days of stirring really, so I am going to speed it up by using a handheld blender. And I just now need to stir it like this until it reaches a stage that we call light trace. It is like custard. Right, that looks like it is done, nice and thick and looking very much like custard. When I drizzle it a little bit across the top, it sits on the surface before floating back into the soap. So, that is a light trace. As we are making goat's milk, this is the right time to add our goat's milk powder. Now, of course, you may have goat's milk, the liquid version that you want to add, and you can add this at the same stage. I am going to add two spoonfuls, just sprinkle it across and then stir it in. But when you're adding liquid goat's milk, it does start to scald and burn and has a rather nasty smell, so what we would recommend is that you freeze your goat's milk in ice cube trays and then add your frozen goat's milk at this stage. It will melt, but it won't burn, so you don't get that horrible smell. It is possible to add your goat's milk to the lye at the beginning of the stage, but you will definitely get this burning smell then. There, beautiful, the goat's milk powder has blended into my soap base beautifully. I am going to add the sensual oil, I have chosen orange as sensual oil because I love the fresh smell. It is quite a lot of orange oil I am putting in here; I have got 14 grams which works out at about 2% in total. You could put in less but you would notice a much faded smell. So, pop that in there. Enjoy the aroma as it comes out and stir it around so that it is completely blended into our soap. Okay, I think that is has blended in well, I cannot see any traces of the orange oil. Now, the soap is ready to pop into the mold. The mold I am using is a plastic lunch box type mold but actually there are many, many things you can use, ice cream cartons or orange juice cartons. My favorite is the base, the double cream display that they have at a local shop. Make sure we get all the soap out. Push it down a bit so it fills up every gap. While at the moment, it does not look much like soap, what we are going to do is leave it for 24 hours wrapped in a towel or blanket to keep warm. So, my organic soap has been under blankets for the last 24 hours and it's now hard enough for me to take out of the mold. There. Lovely. Now, it is not quite ready for use, I need to either leave it in a block or cut it into slices and leave it somewhere for 4 weeks while it just hardens up and gets lovely and ready for me to use in my bath or my shower. And that is how you make organic soap.